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Spring loads beans into application contexts. Any beans declared in XML files or any annotated classes found via component scanning are placed into a suitable application context - either the root application context or one specific to the web application that the bean is declared in.

Any beans declared (or scanned for) which are not DispatcherServlet related (i.e. not -servlet.xml files) are placed into one big root application context bucket, the support for separate XML application context files is purely a convenience for you to manage the logical separation of the beans.

Each DispatcherServlet gets it's own WebApplicationContext which inherits all the beans from the root application context, overlaying all the beans defined within it's web application scope (i.e. any beans within -servlet.xml). Once all the DispatcherServlet's beans are loaded it will attempt to autowire them together and this is where the potential problems start.